A simple and inexpensive space shuttle experimental apparatus to conduct microgravity melting and solidification is presented. A Get-Away-Special (GAS) space furnace was initially developed as a student design project at the United States Air Force Academy and further refined at the NASA Lewis Research Center. The experiment package consists of a melting chamber, battery power system, temperature data recording systems, and electronic controller. The melting chamber is a thin-walled tube wrapped by heating resistance wire. Thermocouples are used to record the specimen thermal history. Power is supplied by two volt batteries wired to produce 360 watts. The millivolt output of the thermocouples is amplified, cold-junction compensated, and converted to a frequency which is then recorded on an off-the-shelf cassette stereo tape recorder. A back up data recording system which digitizes the amplified signal and records the data on EEPROMs (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory) has also been included. This experimental device demonstrates that basic science research can be kept simple and inexpensive.